photos, digital art, and that blurry space in between

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I recently took part in a photography challenge in which, amongst other things, we were given the word “photographer”, and this was my submission:

I wanted to show the way my mind works when I’m out and about – noticing all sorts of stuff, and constantly framing bits of the world around me.

But from idea to end result – that was an interesting and challenging process. I found myself not only going out hunting for the right stuff to shoot, but also learning new photo editing skills so that I could create the sort of thing I was imagining. There was a point along the way when I came very very close to giving up. The moment when I found that Yes! I can do it! was a moment of indescribable exhilaration! I had never done anything remotely like this before. I’m usually much more into shooting whatever grabs me, with perhaps a bit of editing afterwards just to improve the shot, but not this kind of complex merging of different images… Continue reading →

First of all, have a look at this beautiful pic. Enjoy it. Allow yourself to see whatever your imagination shows you.

Now let me tell you how I made it…

It started from this boring screenshot of one of the folders on my computer.

I don’t even remember why I took that screenshot, but I decided it was a good candidate for experimenting with a new tool. The result was this interesting image:

I decided to play with it a bit… Initially I just wanted to give it a less starkly-white background. I uploaded it to PicMonkey and started playing, trying different approaches… the turning point was when I tried the Daguerreotype feature, which made it look much more interesting and arty… totally different mood… I fell in love with that – but not enough to leave it as it was, I felt it needed a bit more… colour, that was the first thing that was missing, so I used the Tint feature to colour it blue. And I used the Soften feature to make it a bit less harsh. And then… oh yes, I looked at the image and felt it needed something more, it looked to me like I had this thing floating around in water and there needed to be other stuff in the water, like you get at the bottom of the sea perhaps…

maybe one of the Textures would help? hmmm… this may not seem obvious for an aquatic scene, but Space is the one I used… those little speckles are officially stars, I guess, but hey, whatever works :)

So there you have it – the back story. Hope that didn’t spoil your enjoyment of the end result!

This started from a photo my friend Max Rubenacker posted on Google+. It was a photo of a wall, with interesting smudges which just grabbed me and made me feel like graffitiing that wall. And Max let me do it! I enjoyed this process so much it should probably be illegal.

(I made three, but this is my favourite. Which is kind of interesting considering that my initial thought was that I wanted to write on that wall. But once you let your right brain start playing, you never know what’s going to come out.)

digital graffiti by meirav berale

I used my usual photo editor, PicMonkey – they have a drawing feature, where you can choose colour, brush thickness, and brush hardness. When choosing colour, you can point it to a bit in the image itself and tell it to use that colour – which is what I did for different parts, so the colours weren’t just coming out of nowhere.